The Zimbabwean Imbroglio

I suppose that one of the more distressing things that might happen to a person is finding that one’s salary, which is paid one in – literally – sacks full of money, can’t buy one a ride home from one’s workplace, or a loaf of bread to eat. It’s not something that I warrant most of us have had to face in our lives – nor something I anticipate that any of us is very likely to face. At least, not unless our economies completely and absolutely implode; and then barter is likely to be a more viable alternative anyway.

However, there have been times in history when such has happened; in Germany, most infamously, in 1923, it happened – and indirectly aided the rise of Hitler to power ten years later. And it’s happening today, in Zimbabwe, as I suppose we all know – in Zimbabwe, the land that suffers under the geriatric iron fist of Robert Mugabe, who has to be forced out of power for it all to stop.

Will it? Well...

In fact, Mugabe has been in control of Zimbabwe since the end of white minority rule in 1980, and for nearly twenty years afterwards, the country wasn’t doing all that badly. Until 1995, going by economic indicators, it was doing pretty well for a nation whose economy was almost entirely agriculture-based, actually.



And then, suddenly, it all fell apart.

It fell apart because, it’s said, Mugabe decided to appropriate the farms belonging to white farmers and hand them over to his cronies and lackeys; and the innocent white farmers who did not knuckle down and hand over their properties were threatened, beaten and murdered. And because the white farmers had all the knowledge, Zimbabwean food production fell through the floor, causing hyperinflation (since, as I said, Zimbabwe has an agrarian economy) and all it brings in its wake – starvation, rampant crime (because money is worthless, if you don’t have anything to barter with, you will take it by any means you can if you need it badly enough) and illegal emigration. All because of the racist anti-white policies of Robert Mugabe.



Oh, Mugabe is a tyrant, true enough; but, as the world has been slowly and painfully discovering, the stories disseminated by the West aren’t always as clear-cut good versus evil tales, shall we say, as they seem.

Now before I go on further to discuss Zimbabwe’s current condition, let’s take a moment to discuss just why Mugabe would want to strip the white farmers of their lands; after all they were as much Zimbabwean citizens as anyone else. The answer had to be plain racism, right?

Wrong.

The answer has everything to do with the history of East and Southern Africa during the colonial period, of how a tiny minority of white farmers ended up occupying virtually all of the land and became the de facto controllers of the national economy. In the beginning, the land was settled by tribal groups whose agriculture was basically on the subsistence level, since the tribes had a barter economy and did not need to produce more than they could consume. But the land was there, and fertile, and the white settlers decided that all that land could make huge farms that could make gigantic profits. There was only one problem – much of that land was already occupied by the tribes.

Nothing simpler than to solve that problem, really. You remember that this was the nineteenth century, and that the loudest talking was done by the Gatling gun. In a process called “alienation”, the black tribesman was removed from his farm, which was handed over to the white colonial settler. The settler, in fact, took over much more land than he could productively use, the idea being to leave the black no land on which to carry out his subsistence farming, so that he would have to go to work on the farm of the new white owner. This was necessary because in the 19th and early 20th centuries farm machinery was rare to nonexistent and farming was a labour-intensive occupation. The policy was explicitly stated as being tailored to force the black to seek employment on white farmsteads, and as recently as the eve of the First World War the leader of the white farmers in the British colony of Kenya was demanding that further land be confiscated from the blacks in order to force them to work for the white planters.

The result of this policy, of course, was that almost all of the arable land available had become the property – without the payment of a penny – of a small clique of white farm owners; and working for them were a black underclass whose members were very conscious of the fact that they were working as labourers on land that had either been theirs or would have been theirs by the process of inheritance. Imagine what that knowledge did to them. (Source: Mau Mau From Within, by Donald Barnett and Karari Njama)

Along with the alienation policy came the need for a further control – because once you have the black man as a labourer on your farm, you need to keep him there. You cannot have experienced and cheap labour migrating afield in search of better employment. The answer was a document which was known in Kenya as the kipande. I don’t know what it was called in Zimbabwe (then, of course, Rhodesia) but for the purposes of this discussion I shall call it the kipande there too.

On the face of it the kipande was nothing very exceptional – it was an identity card issued to the farm labourer identifying him, his place of work and his employer. In practice, though, what it meant was a document of slavery. The labourer could never be off the farm without his kipande, which would have to carry written authority from his employer to allow him even to visit a friend on another farm or a relative in town. Being caught without the kipande was a serious offence that would result in imprisonment and loss of employment.

Therefore the black labourer on the farm was an artificially impoverished bonded slave with no rights of movement or freedom of employment, compelled to work on land which would have been his in the normal course of things. Under any circumstances this wiould build up a massive upswell of resentment.

Then, during the Zimbabwean liberation struggle, first against Britain and then against Ian Smith’s illegal Rhodesian regime, the white farmers openly supported the white racialist government. I still have British military manuals celebrating Rhodesian military action against the “terrorists” (British term as used) of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) of Robert Mugabe, who were fighting against white minority rule, and, not incidentally, for the right of black people to reclaim the farms that were owned by the white minority.  

But when the fighting ultimately culminated in Zimbabwean independence in 1980, the whites remained in place on their farms, part of the unfinished business of the liberation struggle. (Those who remember the last days of apartheid rule in South Africa will recall apocalyptic warnings of anti-white pogroms which, of course, never came to pass. I still remember photos of young white South Africans taking training in the use of handguns for self defence against the black hordes. South Africa, one might argue, only got rid of formal apartheid by allowing the white minority to retain its economic and social privileges virtually intact, and, in fact, blacks in South Africa have benefited little from almost twenty years without apartheid.)

In Zimbabwe, by the last years of the twentieth century, a growing black population that had, like the South African blacks, got little out of independence, exerted its own pressures. The Zimbabwean Army was stuck in the brutal Congolese Civil War, the economy was shrinking, Mugabe had to sack public servants and privatise some firms; disaffection was steadily growing. Mugabe, in order to consolidate his hold on power, decided to fulfil the old pledge of removing the white control over farmland. He claimed that since the farms were white owned not by purchase but by conquest, they belonged by right to the Zimbabwean people and if the white farmers deserved compensation, it was the British government, due to whose policies they had acquired the farms, who should pay for them – not the government of Zimbabwe. It seems rather difficult to counter the logic of this argument, and the British government had earlier agreed to provide such compensation – but later reneged.

The problem was, of course, in the implementation of such a land-reform policy. A century of white ownership and control meant that only the whites possessed the knowledge and ability to run these large farms. The logical move would have been to nationalise the farms and keep on the whites as managers and trainers of black successors as an intermediate measure. What Mugabe did was the direct, but populist, opposite: claiming to return the farms to the people, he sent in armed gangs of “freedom fighters” (many of whom were far too young to have ever been in the freedom struggle) to expel the whites. The predictable result was the collapse of farm production, and in a primarily agricultural nation, it meant the collapse of the economy.

Now Zimbabwe, since 1987, had been a one party state. This by itself is not necessarily a bad thing (there are plenty of one party states, some of them in disguise) – but the fact of the one-party nature of the state means that suddenly Mugabe  found himself called a “dictator” and targeted accordingly with sanctions. At around the same time, other dictators in Africa and elsewhere, like Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, Uganda’s Youweri Museweni, and Ethiopia’s Meles Zenawi, were left perfectly untouched, since they were close to the West. Can it be that we are seeing an element of revenge at play here, to pay out Mugabe for Zimbabwean independence? And is it just possible that had these farm owners been black, there might not have been a reaction in the West? Surely not...

To get back to the point, as AIDS took hold and the agriculture dependent economy collapsed from mismanagement and sanctions, there was large scale emigration until it’s estimated that today, a third of the Zimbabwean population is abroad. Meanwhile, with rising tensions, a group called the Movement for Democratic Change, under Morgan Tsvangirai, was adopted and cheered on by the West.

Now I’ll admit to a particular bias of mine; if the West, by which I mean the USA, its appendages (primarily Britain, Canada and Australia) and the European Union, backs a particular politician or candidate anywhere in the rest of the world, I assume that the said backing is because of some ulterior motive (classic examples are the Western-engineered colour-coded pseudo-revolutions in Eastern Europe, all of which have made life infinitely worse for the peoples of those nations). So even if I have no reason to believe that Mr Tsvangirai, who was recently injured in a vehicular crash that killed his wife, is personally a Western puppet, a Zimbabwean Mikheil Saakashvili or Viktor Yushchenko, I am absolutely sure that the forces behind him are preparing to manipulate him for that role.

The recent history of Zimbabwe is too well known for me to keep going over it now, but I’ll mention a few things:

First, the propaganda. It’s true that Mugabe is a dictator; but the intensity and blatant one-sidedness of  the propaganda unleashed, mostly very crudely but often subtly, against him in the West is proof, if any were needed, that there’s something more at play here than the obvious. Nobody is ever all good or all evil; if someone’s projected as one or the other, any normal-thinking individual ought to think twice before accepting what he or she is told. Especially he or she ought to think twice if the same people who claimed Saddam Hussein had a WMD programme and Britain was “45 minutes from annihilation” now make claims like this.

Second, the fact is that Mr Tsvangirai (I shall always include the “Mr” honorific for him but never for Mugabe, whom I shall not call President Mugabe; not because of any bias I have in the matter but just to point out the crass propaganda lenses through which we all have to look at that hapless nation) is now the Prime Minister of Zimbabwe after a power sharing agreement with Mugabe. It is true that in all probability Mr Tsvangirai would have won elections and so acceded to the President’s chair; but Mugabe (for reasons I shall shortly discuss) did not accept those election results, and after much violence that power sharing agreement was hammered out, with Mugabe retaining power over the military, but Mr Tsvangirai still controlling a large part of the power. This was not the ideal solution for Mr Tsvangirai, who by rights might have expected to control all of the government, but was still better than what happened to the Islamic party which won an election in Algeria and were completely and violently blocked out of power by the Army – while the same West had cheered.

Third, the fact is that although Mugabe and Mr Tsvangirai are now sharing power, the United States and the West (by and large American camp-followers) have continued to impose sanctions against Zimbabwe “as long as Mugabe remains in power”. That might be a very, very long time indeed, because Mugabe will be very reluctant to cede power if he is not granted immunity from prosecution. He will remember the history of Charles Taylor of Liberia, who was extradited from Nigerian asylum to stand trial before the International Criminal Court, a place which seems to specialise in the prosecution of non-white/East European accused only (surely it ought to have indictments, at the very least, made out against George W Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Tony Blair over Iraq?). Anyway, to return to the point, there is absolutely no way Mugabe, or his generals, will give up power unless they are assured of a trouble-free life thereafter. It may not be pleasing to those who regard Mugabe as a cannibal monster, but the fact remains that the chances of Mugabe relinquishing power decrease in direct proportion to his being demonised.

Fourthly, the economic condition of Zimbabwe defies imagination. The word “hyperinflation” does not do it justice any more; money loses most of its value between the time it arrives in banks and its being disbursed; the inflation rate has passed all rational computing; and of course the misery of the people is burgeoning. Under these circumstances, to continue sanctions is no longer a bad joke but a crime, and a counterproductive crime at that. Unless hard currency is available, and fast, there is no way the condition of life for the ordinary Zimbabweans is going to improve – and it is, even according to the propaganda, the ordinary poor Zimbabweans who are suffering the most from the conditions in their country.



All of which seems to point at only one likely answer – the West has no desire that things should improve in Zimbabwe.

Therefore, the question to be asked is...why?

As always in these things, the answer lies in a further question: who benefits? In this context, obviously, there is nothing much to be got out of Zimbabwe; even if a few white farmers are restored their farms, it is not going to rescue the country overnight. So we must look elsewhere.

And if we look elsewhere, and see the implosion of Zimbabwe through other eyes, that we see the reason; Zimbabwe is being made an example of, a warning of what happens to those who dare to oppose Imperial decree. Specifically, it would be a warning to South Africa, whose vibrant (by current standards) economy is still firmly in white hands and where a new, populist President, Jacob Zuma, is due to win next month’s elections. If Zuma’s African National Congress wins a big enough majority, he could potentially make South Africa a one-party state, nationalise foreign-owned companies, and take real steps to empower the blacks at the expense of the white power elite. Any or all of these steps would be anathema to the Imperium.

And that is why Zimbabwe shall continue to suffer.